* Posts by Tom 7

8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009

Bacon is not my vodka friend

Tom 7

Re: @Measurer

And they let you drink US mass produced beer?

Tom 7

I know a cheese that would go really well with. No idea what its called tho;

Never underestimate the Basques.

You can be my wingman any time! RaspBerry Pi AI waxes Air Force top gun's tail in dogfights

Tom 7

Re: T500

Its not just the rise of the machines that you have to worry about - its the rapid approach from any angle.

Tom 7

Re Phew thats a relief

Sopwith Camels would have pretty much a non-existant radar response too! Stealth attacks that would be mistaken for the local youth on a moped would be all the rage.

Undergrads build 12.6-TFLOPS cluster out of four nodes, 112 cores

Tom 7

Not moores law?

I couldn't find any rules on the competition sight (didnt look too hard) but I would have expected a somewhat different graph.

Not trying to belittle anyone's work - just curious.

Gun-jumping French pols demand rapid end to English in EU

Tom 7

Sorting out a new PM is going to be amusing.

There's a wonderful story from a bloke called Blaster Bates where some guys were 'testing' dynamite in a river and a local farmer came to find out what the noise was. His dog saw a stick of dynamite fly into the river and retrieved it and returned it to the men who had thrown it in. Have you ever seen two men trying to hide behind each others backs?

Botnet-powered ballot stuffing suspected in 2nd referendum petition

Tom 7

Re: Probably don't care

@James Howat - and the real leave campaign were perfectly happy to stand with him next to the bus with the £350million claim on it.

Beautiful model to explain the universe to physicists

Tom 7

Just spent 2hrs loading the software and bulding the model and I read this

"The example files provided are mostly too large to run on a single machine. You can try however to run the static_tov example which is smallest and requires about 1.3GB of RAM to run and will run for about 24 hours using a single core. To speed up the run, you can try and reduce the resolution by increasing the parameters "CoordBase::dx", "CoordBase::dy", and "CoordBase::dz" from 8 to 12 which will reduce runtime to roughly 5 hours and memory consumption to 800MB"

First time I've go all 8 cores on my laptop running hard and I find the fan is a tad noisy!

Tom 7

Re: Am I the only one...

Well at least you've got some tissues to cry into!

DARPA's 'flying wing' drone inches closer to lift-off

Tom 7

Re: 1950's redux

The Nazis had a flying wing in 1944 - and managed to invent patois at the same time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horten_Ho_229

Tech firms reel from Leave's Brexit win

Tom 7

@DCfusor

thats the 1% we supposedly just voted our. What happens to the 99% or algae to keep up the alliteration?

Holy Crap! Bloke finishes hand-built CPU project!

Tom 7

Re: Hydraulic valves, I trust?

Checkout the Z3 - relays. 1st turing complete machine.

Patriotic Brits rush into streets to celebrate… National Cream Tea Day

Tom 7

My next door neighbour has a large dairy herd

and every xmas they make a batch of unpasteurised clotted cream. I'm lactose intolerant but by christ that stuff is too good to worry about a few stomach cramps which can be hidden by gallons of booze and . I live a few miles west of the Tamar so I feel entitled to eat my cream scones both ways (home made Strawberry jam - none of this corn syrup shit) and so long as its got this cream on it I dont care which way you do it!

If we make unpasteurised dairy products compulsory now we are out of the EU something good may come of it yet.

PM resigns as Britain votes to leave EU

Tom 7

Re: Mission creep

And if it does shake the EU politicos up a bit then the UK will benefit not one iota. We've already dropped so France is now the worlds 5th largest economy.

We used to be the Gateway to Europe, we're now praying someone wants the moss that will be growing on it.

Raspberry Pi 3 tops SBC poll for self-brew hackers and Linux folk

Tom 7

"it’s encouraging to see the growing interest in gnarly-looking circuit boards

that require" a couple of leads to turn them into the gizmo of one’s dreams.

Not smiling for the camera? Adobe's Creative Cloud suite can fix that

Tom 7

The camera never

tells the truth anymore.

Rejoice, fatties: Giving chocolate electric shocks makes it healthier

Tom 7

Re: 25% less taste

I tend to stick to 70% or higher. Two or three pieces savoured slowly do the job. Milk chocolate just gets eaten - never quite enjoyed.

Should we teach our kids how to program humanity out of existence?

Tom 7

Re: "a massive drain on my television-watching time"

I was off work ill one day when I saw a cartoon called Dr Snuggles - it was brilliant. I put it down to Hills Bronchial Balsam which contained morphine acetate in those days. I set the video for other episodes.

Found out many years later some of it was written by John Lloyd and Douglas Adams. Almost as good as Maid Marion and her Merry Men!

Tom 7

I did sciences at A level and read the books that the english students were made to study - I loved them, they hated them. I started programming at 15 on bits of paper someone took to the tech and returned with the (shit) results. We programmed in FORTRAN IV (not shouting it was uppercase then) on an almost permanently 'hardware fault'ed ICL mainframe at uni and then a PDP11 for a term. That started to get interesting and managed to simulate a nuclear bomb - not what I should have been doing!

What really turned me on to programming was, as a chip designer when CAD was at about puberty level, was realising how much work I could get computers to do rather than me having to do it.

Laziness is the true mother of invention - but you cant really appreciate the true power of programming until you've done that shit by hand first.

Dad of student slain in Paris terror massacre sues Google, Twitter, Facebook for their 'material support' of ISIS

Tom 7

Re: "medieval terror bastards"

I think a better term would be Dark Age Intelligence Avoiders.

GitHub presses big red password reset button after third-party breach

Tom 7

Two factor authentication or lockout as I call it.

I have one bank account that has two factor authentication - the items they choose for me to remember are either hopelessly insecure or not memorable.

So I cant get in without a lot of phone calls.

Voter registration site collapse proves genius of GDS, says minister

Tom 7

What do they run this stuff on?

Just asking as I have just managed to DOS a simple python/flask website by soak testing it and doing more than 50 transactions a minute it went awol. It was a simple form filling and dumping the data in a sqlite database and the soaking was done from the local network. And the monitor program mailed me it was down before the soak testing was happy it had killed it.

OK not quite up to registering a country before an referendum but it was on a RaspberryPi Zero ffs.

Boffins decipher manual for 2,000-year-old Ancient Greek computer

Tom 7

Re: In other words, a user manual.

Have you tried re-booting it over the side?

Tom 7

Re: Does it start with

Its seems this may have been made by Archimedes who was indeed killed by the romans, Though not 'intentionally'.

However I'm still at a loss to discover why he was called 'Top Thinker' from birth!

Chinese loan sharks seek salacious selfies as collateral

Tom 7

Re: Can't see that ever working

It wouldnt work here - my selfie would probably be one of Jordans pics. I could send on of me but the loan shark would not be able to finish the transaction.

Astroboffins' discovery gives search for early life a left hand. Or right

Tom 7

Re: I know, obvious is not scientific proof,

Typically dominate? But by what amount? I have a problem with people saying its a mystery why all life is made of left handed amino acids. Its not - if the first replicating molecule was left handed then everything that follows will be left handed. Its 50-50 so not 'astronomical' at all.

If we find anything that suggests there is a cosmological/quantum reason for chirality that is a different matter but will have little influence on how we work out how life started.

Silicon Valley granddad and HP boss-killer Tom Perkins dies aged 84

Tom 7

Re: A character all right

While Stalin was a major league twat it seems that Columbus may have caused the biggest genocide of the lot by bringing new diseases to the new world. The continued claim there were only a few million natives in what is now the US while the accepted value for central america at the same time is over 70 million, while possibly 70 million buffalo roamed there has always struck me as being hard to grasp.

Bill Gates cooks up poultry recipe for Africans' paltry existence

Tom 7

Re: Goats...

They're getting more popular here as curry goat amazes people. Its superb meat - better than lamb IMHO and my lamb (well hogget) is some of the best you'll never eat. But it needs fencing in otherwise it will eat anything - there is a good chicken and egg argument over goats and the sahara desert: where goats have been successfully managed the sahara greens!

But like chickens goats are cheap to produce which makes them 'lower status' and very low profit. Carp is a fine eating fish (you can pass it off as sea bass!) and very easy to produce but having been regarded as lower class fodder (or possibly papist) its not so 'marketable'. You have to remember that in Victorian times they brought in rules to prevent people feeding their house staff salmon more than three times a week as its was dirt cheap and it was regarded as inhumane to make them eat it too much!

Tom 7

$81 billion.

That was the money the US spent on corn subsidies last year.

Do you think African chickens can compete with that?

I keep around a dozen or two chickens and ducks on an around 1/2 and acre. There is not a single bug or edible plant left on that ground. I could let them run free but I would have none.

Imagine BG gives you 3 Point Of Lay hens and a cockerel - any less hens and the cockerel will shag them to death. If they are dual purpose birds with broody hens and you dont eat the eggs (one every two days say) after two weeks you will have 21 eggs and a broody hen will sit on them. After another 21 days you will have 20 chicks half male/half female. So after 22 weeks since getting the birds (20 weeks to laying ish) you will have 13 laying birds and 11 cockerels. After another 22 weeks you could have hundreds of birds. Its so easy you have to wonder why it hasnt just happened. BG is about to find out.

Tom 7

Re: [Expletive deleted]!

I have a dozen or two poultry of various forms.

Gates is clucking in the wrong forest.

Tom 7

What these people really need

is for us to stop their leaders propping up our economy by buying up London mansions and weapons.

Tom 7

Re: Teching self-help

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will wear a silly hat.

And wipe out whatever fish are nearby.

Tom 7

Re: Thinking it through

Its not hard to dump overproduction - it costs 30p to ship a phone from China to the UK. I cant imagine it costs much more to get a load of frozen chickens over to Africa.

And it might be hard to scrape a bit of wheat from your back garden but you are going to have to scrape 3.5 times more to get an egg and 7 times more to get a bit of meat than you are just eating the grain.

Tom 7

And they would have to sell the chickens to buy the food to feed them.

They dont live on fresh air!

Bin Apple's $500m patent judgment, US DoJ tells Supreme Court

Tom 7

Bin Apple?

They terrorists now?

Tom 7

Re: Wow

Could be common sense and justice.

I'd be surprised if it was though!

Brexit threatens Cornish pasty's racial purity

Tom 7

Re: Sarcasm

I live on the Devon/Cornwall border. Lots and lots of Brexit posters - surprisingly mostly on farm gates and fences. Where they employ gang labour from europe and other sources.

I take my animals for slaughter and the vet who examines them is Spanish, the one before was Polish. I get the impression if Brexit goes ahead we will be in trouble round here cos most of the non-foreign incomers round here are exports from the social security systems of UK cities and aren't really up to a day of cattle wrestling.

I can understand the anger that drive some people to have a go at immigration but that anger will still be here when the immigrants have gone and were swimming in Elderflower Champagne and the fields are full of rotting roses and I'm pretty sure it will be pointing at any one who mentions it possibly being a mistake,

It's not us, it's you: Boffins ditch supercomputers in lust for new materials

Tom 7

Re: Scratches head

I tried taking quarks - gave me hiccups!

Developer waits two years for management to define project

Tom 7

Re: Management...

Management and sales are two sides of the same valueless coin.

I have frequently sat in meetings and listened to them swap buzzwords and gradually worked out something that is relatively easy to implement and goes a long way to solving a lot of problems. Then the shit hits the fan when, having been painted into a corner and having some software that actually solves 90 percent of the clients needs, it becomes apparent that the clients needs are secondary to sales and managements needs to obfuscate things.

I wrote a client facing web app that allowed customers to see all their orders and buy all our products that was largely scrapped because a couple of our major customers would have found out they had been overcharged by 3 or 400% for a basic product. The sales and management teams of course got huge bonuses as a result of overcharging and weren't convinced they wouldnt be out of pocket.

PC market sinking even faster than first thought, thanks to Windows 10

Tom 7

Re: You could say

MS seem unable to offer anything other than basic Windows on ARM. In a few years all MS will be legacy.

Tom 7

You could say

MS is pissing in Intels chips!

Microsoft has created its own FreeBSD image. Repeat. Microsoft has created its own FreeBSD image

Tom 7

Re: this is not your father's Microsoft.

I still have it somewhere - a stack of 7 or so bluenotsofloppies.

Dyfed-Powys Police fined for publicising pervs' particulars

Tom 7

Re: For some reason, the identities of sex offenders are kept confidential in the UK

Not only does it help prevent paediatricians and other innocent parties being harrassed or worse it also helps prevent sex offenders getting together for parties.

Surveillance forestalls more 'draconian' police powers – William Hague

Tom 7

Re: If you criminalise encryption

Can YOU spot the IDIOT encryption in this? I've highlighted it to make it obvious but normally it wouldnt be.

Tom 7

Re: Book ciphers/one off messages

Another computer can break it. Perhaps - but like quantum decryption how do you know you've decrypted it? For any random message you can apply a 'decryption' key that will product the message 'Bomb the capitalist pigs now!" but you dont know that is correct.

Our CompSci exam was full of 'typos', admits Scottish exam board

Tom 7

Re: By design?

I've found the best thing to do with a tender document is to work out who it was written for and ask them for a job.

Tom 7

In my big school finals

my electronics exam had many questions pertaining to Microporcessors.

I'm afraid to say some of the kids coming out of uni now after an IT course wouldnt be able to hazard a guess at what that could be.

Bloke flogs $40 B&W printer on Craigslist, gets $12,000 legal bill

Tom 7

Re: Follow the directions

Have you checked the date of that suggestion - you may find it is later than this court action.

England just not windy enough for wind farms, admits renewables boss

Tom 7

Re: Nuclear

I wonder how much more its going to cost now brexit is looking more likely? I'd guess over 4x current rates.

Tom 7

Re: Tidal? Power loss

But how much of that power would you lose in transferring it down south to Birmingham for example?

About the same for nuclear.